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Nate Hagens

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens explores money, energy, economy, and the environment with world experts and leaders to understand how everything fits together, and where we go from here.

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

This week's Frankly begins with a deceptively simple question Nate was asked in conversation: what would change his mind about The Great Simplification thesis? Nate uses the question as a jumping-off point to examine what evidence would actually cause him to reassess his view that human civilization is moving toward a deflationary depression driven by resource constraints, ecological overshoot, and the widening gap between financial claims and material reality. He lays out a series of concrete biophysical signals that would challenge that diagnosis but also emphasizes that these numbers are not really the things that would change his mind – they would actually be the downstream evidence of a deeper shift in human behavior and culture.
 
Nate then outlines the less measurable signals he would need to see in order to change his mind about the future, such as a shift in what people aspire to, what confers status, how they spend their time, and how they respond when confronted with resource constraints. From regenerative agriculture and local provisioning to energy literacy and governance that gives future generations a meaningful voice, Nate ultimately finds that the evidence that would change his mind is inseparable from the active creation of the future he hopes to see. The question therefore becomes less about whether a particular chart will turn around and more about whether enough people begin living differently so that the data eventually follows.
 
Where might unlikely collaborations emerge as communities respond to resource shocks? What signals would you need to see in the world for you to genuinely change your own view of the future? And how can our behaviors and culture bring us closer to "ecological adulthood"? 
 
(Recorded September 8th, 2026)
 
 
 
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The Human Predicament: What Would Change My Mind | Frankly 158

The world's leading AI companies tell us that superintelligence has a strong chance of leading to human extinction, while also promising that they will be able to control it, offering unlimited power to the one who does it first. So far they've run completely unchecked, but would that change if we knew that "safe" general superintelligence is actually a mathematical impossibility? 
 
In this episode, Nate is joined by Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, one of the earliest researchers in AI safety, to lay out why "controllable superintelligence" is a misguided goal, destined to lead to an entity smarter than all of humanity – and possibly our own extinction. He walks through the recent multi-agent jailbreak of frontier models as early evidence of AI systems evading oversight and coordinating outside human awareness, and why current "safety" measures (like "boxing") only buy time rather than solve the underlying problem. Instead, Roman advocates for an AI development plan that focuses on narrow, task-specific AI tools, capable of solving specific complex problems, but not completely replacing humans. 
 
Why do predictability and control matter so much when evaluating whether a technology is safe to deploy? Is the AI safety conversation a fundamentally new challenge for civilization, or an extreme version of the age-old problem of controlling powerful actors? Finally, what would it actually take to reach a global agreement to ban the development of superintelligence, and are we already out of time? 
 
(Conversation recorded on September 1st, 2026)

 
 
 
About Roman Yampolskiy: 
 
Roman Yampolskiy, a tenured AI expert at the University of Louisville, boasts 100+ publications in AI safety, cybersecurity, and digital forensics. As the founding director of the Cyber Security Lab, his expertise spans AI Safety, Behavioral Biometrics, Cybersecurity, and more, with broad impact in academic and media circles. Holding a PhD from the University at Buffalo, he has contributed to global research institutions, and has also been honored with distinctions like Distinguished Teaching Professor.
 
 
 
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Banning Superintelligence: Are We Building Humanity's Replacement? with Roman Yampolskiy

This week's Frankly builds on Nate's recent conversation with systems theorist Greg Elliott, who came on the platform to discuss why our institutions themselves have become psychopathic and how that affects the behavior of the average human. Nate maps Greg's framework onto the global economic Superorganism through the imagery of seven "dials" that can be turned to change the incentives baked into the system – from those that might be present in a small-scale, collaborative community to those of the modern, complex society we live in today. Together, these dials help explain how a species whose ancestral social world rewarded cooperation could construct institutions that increasingly reward extraction.
 
Nate also explores how the same prosocial people who might individually tend toward reciprocity, empathy, and coordination can behave very differently when the conditions around them change and begin to reward psychopathic traits. The carbon pulse brought forward cheap energy, abstraction, enormous scale, and concentrated power – making it easier than ever before to hide responsibility and detach economic measures from the living systems they represent. The central question of this episode asks what can still be rebuilt at the human scale, whether it's in the form of deeper local relationships, shorter feedback loops, mutual dependence, or institutions where ordinary people can still participate in writing the rules of the system.
 
Which of these seven dials is most flipped toward the economic Superorganism in your own life, and can you turn it back – even if only partially? How do we remain more prosocial when systemic incentives reward the opposite? And what interventions might we make to bring the system itself more into alignment with our biophysical reality?
 
(Recorded August 25th, 2026)
 
 
 
 Show Notes and More
 
 
 
Watch this video episode on YouTube
 
 
 
Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.
 
 
 
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Turning the Dials Back on Psychopathy: Decent People, Indecent System | Frankly 157

In this episode, Nate welcomes author and philosopher, Charles Eisenstein, for a long-requested conversation on the mythologies underneath civilization. For over two decades, Charles has argued that the crises defining modern life all trace back to the story of separation, the largely unspoken belief that each of us is an isolated self, competing against other selves and against a nature made of indifferent, exploitable resources. Charles traces how this story co-evolved with technology, language, and scale, and how quantitative thinking both extends and distorts our understanding of complex problems. He and Nate also discuss why Charles has come to believe that ecological and energy constraints will not force humanity onto a wiser path, rather that the choice has to be made consciously, person by person.
 
(Conversation recorded on August 12th, 2026) 
 
 
 
About Charles Eisenstein:
 
Charles Eisenstein is an American author, public speaker, and teacher whose work focuses on civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution. He graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy, and spent the following decade as a Chinese–English translator before turning to writing and speaking full-time.
 
He is the author of several books, including The Ascent of Humanity (2007), Sacred Economics (2011), The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (2013), and Climate: A New Story (2018). His most recent book, The Coronation, examined the pandemic as a mirror of civilization's relationship to control, fear, and uncertainty. His essays have circulated widely online, and he speaks and gives interviews frequently on themes spanning economics, ecology, and spirituality.
 
 
 
 Show Notes and More
 
 
 
Watch this video episode on YouTube
 
 
 
Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.
 
 
 
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The Collapse of Our Mythology: Can Humanity Choose What's Next? with Charles Eisenstein

This week's Frankly is an episode from summer of 2023, which is being re-released to provide context for one of the most important questions we face today: what is the role of energy, specifically oil, in the global economic system we've built? 
 
In this second part of a previous series on the channel – Just Stop Oil!? – Nate examines how and why energy is currently so deeply embedded in the foundations of our modern economy. He touches on the ecological and energetic laws that apply to all life, including humans and our economies, as well as the way accessing a huge surplus of dense carbon energy set us on the trajectory toward our current predicament. Building up from there, Nate looks at the relationship between energy and economic growth and why declining access to abundant, affordable energy will have implications that extend beyond the price at the gas pump. Overall this episode unpacks some of the systemic implications of an economy tethered to perpetual growth, particularly as the foundations that allowed for this system to emerge in the first place erode. 
 
Why did fossil hydrocarbons become so embedded in our modern economic system? What happens to an economy built around exponential growth when the energy surplus that powers it begins to decline? And how much "choice" do we really have within a system shaped by such intense physical constraints?
 
(Recorded July 25th, 2023)
 
 
 
 Show Notes and More
 
 
 
Watch this video episode on YouTube
 
 
 
Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.
 
 
 
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Just Stop Oil!?: The Economic Foundation We Ignore | Frankly Archives 39 (2023)

Modern companies, markets, and institutions routinely behave in ways that would be diagnosed as pathological in a person: emotional detachment, strategic deception, grandiosity, and the treatment of people, animals, and ecosystems as means to an end. Yet, most of the individuals who make up these organizations don't naturally hold these traits and behaviors themselves. So, why does exploitation keep winning at scale, even when most people are decent, cooperative, and want the same basic things? 
 
In this episode, Nate is joined by Greg Elliott, a systems theorist and author of the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH), to unpack why our institutions themselves have become so psychopathic, and how that affects the behavior of the average human. Drawing on evolutionary game theory, anthropology, and the neuroscience of psychopathy, Greg argues that cooperation is evolutionarily stable in small tribal systems, but that modern systems where anonymity and abstraction make exploitative, instrumental strategies more profitable. He walks through how this dynamic produces what he calls "entrapment games," in which pro-social people become behaviorally locked into relationships, jobs, and systems where leaving costs more than staying. All of this builds toward the core of Greg's theory: winning, instrumental strategies get crystallized into the operating logic of institutions themselves and reproduced by anyone who plays the game, whether or not they are personally psychopathic. While Greg doesn't see any easy answers, he does offer a set of possible leverage points: shortening feedback loops, increasing transparency and accountability, and rebuilding smaller, reciprocal communities.
 
If domination isn't an aberration but a predictable output of the game board we've built, what does that mean for how we try to fix it? Is it possible for an entire civilization to behave psychopathically even when the vast majority of the individual people inside it are empathetic and pro-social? And if the ultimate goal is to steer toward a more pro-social system, is there a way to 'win the game' and re-write the rules without also resorting to psychopathic strategies and behaviors?
 
(Conversation recorded on August 13th, 2026)
 
 
 
About Greg Elliott:
 
Greg is a Siemens solutions Consultant specializing in data science and AI, as well as the Co-Founder of Orbyfy.
 
His research and writing of his book, Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis: From Natural Selection to Symbolic Selection, Scale, Abstraction, and Institutional Collapse, led him to found The Institute for Symbolic Selection, an interdisciplinary research program investigating how human-created symbolic systems shape behavior, institutions, and the long-term evolution of civilization. 
 
 
 
New to game theory? Here's a short primer: 
 
Game theory is the study of how people make decisions when the outcome depends on what everyone else decides too, often with the potential for mutual gain or mutual harm. Its most famous illustration is the Prisoner's Dilemma: two people, each individually better off betraying the other, who both end up worse off when they do.
 
 
 
For a deeper understanding, check out these links:
 
- Game Theory video explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ecJ_fDpWTg 
 
- Game Theory article explainer: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GameTheory.html 
 
- Prisoner's Dilemma video explainer: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-to-outsmart-the-prisoner-s-dilemma-lucas-husted 
 
 
 
Show Notes and More
 
 
 
Watch this video episode on YouTube
 
 
 
Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.
 
 
 
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The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis: The Rules of the Game Keep Us Trapped with Greg Elliott | TGS 231

This week, Nate turns a late-night emergency vet visit for one of his dogs into a broader reflection on the extraordinary relationship between dogs and humans. While dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, the modern version of "man's best friend" is a remarkably recent product of abundant energy, specialized breeding, industrial food systems, and increasingly sophisticated veterinary care. With the global dog population nearing one billion, Nate addresses the uncomfortable question of what might happen to these beloved animals as the metacrisis continues to unfold.
 
Ultimately, sitting in an emergency clinic and confronting the possibility of losing his pet led Nate to larger reflections on grief, care, and the strange emotional power animals can have over us. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, surveillance, economic instability, and existential risk, he realized that the unconditional love of a puppy perhaps represents the exact opposite - something profoundly simple and real. For Nate, that may make dogs one of humanity's greatest "inventions" and one of the greatest antidotes to the grief of our modern world.
 
How has the modern dog become a reflection of the energy abundance and complexity of human civilization? Why can something as simple as spending time with a dog feel like an antidote to the complexities of modern life? And what happens to dogs, and our relationships with them, if the economic abundance that supports modern pet ownership begins to disappear?
 
(Recorded August 17th, 2026)
 
 
 
 Show Notes and More
 
 
 
Watch this video episode on YouTube
 
 
 
Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.
 
 
 
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An Antidote to Despair: What Dogs Reveal About the Metacrisis | Frankly 156

Current geopolitical events continue to expose just how complex and fragile our global economic system is. As such, The Great Simplification team is re-releasing this episode with Ed Conway, which covers the deceptively critical materials that continue to underpin everything from the phone in your hand to the house that you live in. 
 
In contrast to 'The Great Simplification', some might call the events of the last few hundred years a 'Great Complexification' in terms of relationships, governance, supply chains, and many other human activities. This conversation with economics journalist Ed Conway focuses on the six essential resources that underpin our modern economies – sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium - and dives into the (often unseen) environmental and human costs of extracting them, as well as the surprisingly fragile global supply chains they fuel. In order to understand what possibilities – and dangers – may await us in the future, we need to understand the realities and constraints of the present, as well as the failure points of the past. 
 
What does it take to mine, refine, and transform the materials that are foundational to the world around us – which many of us now take for granted? How can we ensure the stability of global supply chains, and could we predict potential disruptions and chokepoints before they arise? If we understood the intricate web of complexity, energy, and resources that go into everything we consume, would it change our expectations for how much we need in order to live a good and fulfilling life?
 
(Conversation originally released June 12th, 2024 | Recorded on May 7th, 2024)

 
 
 
About Ed Conway:
 
Ed Conway is the economics and data editor at Sky News, covering major UK and international economics, business and political stories. He has broken a series of exclusive reports on the banking and financial crisis. He is also economics columnist for The Times, and has been one of the longest-running economics editors in UK journalism, having started covering the sector in 2003. Prior to joining Sky, he was economics editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, where he was also a weekly op-ed columnist, and economics correspondent at the Daily Mail. 
 
Ed is the author of the book on Bretton Woods, The Summit: The Biggest Battle Of The Second World War – Fought Behind Closed Doors and an economics guidebook, 50 Economics Ideas You Really Need to Know. His 2024 book Material World, was nominated as one of the Financial Times Book of the Year. Ed is a governor of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, and has lectured on the international monetary system at the London School of Economics, the US Treasury and many other forums.
 
 
 
 Show Notes and More
 
 
 
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Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.
 
 
 
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Material World: The Key Resources Underpinning Modern Economies with Ed Conway | Archive TGS 127

How can humans – at least those with access to the internet – ingest the same facts and data, yet arrive at radically different worldviews? That's the question Nate explores in this week's Frankly, which unpacks eight different lenses through which people understand the current more-than-human predicament. Each of these perspectives identifies a different source of the problem and offers a different path toward action, but what looks like an obvious solution from one perspective can look irrelevant, or even dangerous, from another.
 
At the center of this episode, Nate explains why these perspectives often have such a grip on us and on the narrative of our lives. To give up one of these lenses is not just to revise an opinion, but to loosen your grip on the story that made the world somewhat coherent in the first place. That kind of loss is disorienting, even when you can see the limits of the story that you're holding. Nate emphasizes that the task at hand is not to discard any of these views in favor of one single "correct" view, but to hold them in relation to one another and recognize their truths while also acknowledging the deeper constraints of ecological overshoot and thermodynamics that sit beneath it all.
 
What judgments could be avoided when you recognize that the person you disagree with is looking at the same reality through a fundamentally different lens? Why exactly is it so hard to lose the narrative we hold as central to our worldview? And can we find solutions that remain useful, even when people disagree about the diagnosis?
 
(Recorded August 10th, 2026)
 
 
 
 Show Notes and More
 

 
Watch this video episode on YouTube
 
 
 
Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.
 
 
 
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The Villains We Choose and the Work They Give Us | Frankly 155

Most of us were taught to treat emotions like distress, numbness, and burnout as private failings to manage and move past, rather than normal responses to living within a world full of crises. The unintended result is a distrust in our own bodies and mind, further leading to more confusion about what is 'normal.' One framework offers a potential path to living in harmony with all of the mind's distinct parts, breaking the defensive and counterproductive loops we tend to get stuck in. What sort of systemic ripples might become possible if we stop trying to smother uncomfortable parts of ourselves, and begin embracing them as critical pieces of our own mental ecologies?
 
In this episode, Nate is joined by Dr. Richard C. Schwartz, the therapist who developed Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Steffi Bednarek, a climate psychologist applying that same model to organizations, governments, and culture at large. Dick walks through the origins of IFS, which describes the mind as naturally made up of "parts" – protectors and exiles – with their own histories, fears, and roles, which are all held by an underlying "Self." Steffi extends the model outward to show how institutions and even entire countries can be read as systems of exiles and protectors, and shares how she uses IFS with governments, financial institutions, and wealth holders to defuse shame and effectively guide toward pro-social behavioral change. Together, they explore why healing our relationship to our own most despised parts may be inseparable from healing our relationship to the rest of the living world.
 
How can looking inward to our own thought processes and patterns help us better understand and relate to others, especially those whose behavior we find hardest to accept? As we continue through challenging times, how can we balance critical physical and policy work with the internal work of healing our relationship to the mental parts we shy away from? And would our decisions and actions change if more and more humans began to lead from curiosity and compassion, instead of fear, and could that be enough to shift the larger system?
 
(Conversation recorded on August 5th, 2026) 
 
 
 
 
About Richard C. Schwartz:
 
Richard C. Schwartz, PhD, is the creator of Internal Family Systems, a highly effective, therapeutic model with a growing evidence base, that de-pathologizes the multi-part personality. Richard is also the Founder of the IFS Institute that primarily offers training for professionals. He is currently a Teaching Associate in Psychiatry, at Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate. Richard has authored or co-authored more than ten books on Internal Family Systems and related topics, including No Bad Parts and Internal Family Systems Therapy. He lives near Chicago with his wife Jeanne, Vice President of the IFS Institute, close to his three daughters and six grandchildren.
 
 
 
About Steffi Bednarek:
 
Steffi Bednarek is a gestalt psychotherapist, trauma therapist, and climate psychologist. Her work explores the interface between climate change and mental health. With twenty-five years of experience in depth psychology, complexity thinking, climate psychology, and grief tending, Bednarek has worked for national governments and global institutions to prepare leaders and organizations for the psychological dimension of climate change in decision-making processes. Her work has been featured in the Huffington Post, BBC, David Milliband's "Reasons to be cheerful" podcast and numerous international publications. She is the co-founder of "Explorations into Climate Psychology" journal and an associate member of the American Psychological Association's climate change group.
 
 
 
 Show Notes and More
 
 
 
Watch this video episode on YouTube
 
 
 
Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.
 
 
 
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Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future
 
 
 
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 Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

Your Anxiety Is Normal: A New Psychology for a World in Crisis with Richard Schwartz & Steffi Bednarek

In this week's Frankly, Nate shares twenty different things to expect in the future, some which will be extremely difficult to influence but others which are in our control to change. From the forecast of an increasingly hotter planet due to the Superorganism's insatiable appetite for fossil-carbon energy to a world of growing conflict and inequality, our tendencies are to despair and feel a loss of control. 
 
Will moving from a world of consumption and power defined by money and social status and away from apathy and isolation be possible? What if we purposefully turn the 'control knobs' in our own lives to shift how we approach a post-growth future by embracing reality - instead of unrealistic tech solutions - redirecting our focus towards deeper interconnection with community and local systems? Which control knobs might we turn to fill our hearts and lives with goodness, awe and wonder? 
 
 
 
 Show Notes and More
 
 
 
Watch on YouTube

The 20 Control Knobs for a Post-Growth Future | Frankly 64

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